NYC Blooms with OpenStreetMap

Mon 01 December 2014

A community mapping project in New York is showing how OpenStreetMap
can not only show how mapping can help people navigate, it can shape
how people perceive their city.

New York City contains hundreds of
community gardens. These
gardens represent the the hard work of thousands of New Yorkers coming
together to make these spaces come to life, and in some cases growing
their own vegetables to be either given away or sold at local
markets. Yet these gardens don't appear on most maps. Only a few of
them appear on Google Maps, and none of them appear on the New York
City maps, where the community gardens appear as vacant lots.

OpenStreetMap NYC, the local
OpenStreetMap community group, in collaboration with
GrowNYC, a New York City based
environmental non-profit, are working to increase the visibility of
these gardens through a collaborative mapping project. GrowNYC has
released their data about New York community gardens to the
OpenStreetMap community to help encourage their inclusion on the
map. Because of OpenStreetMap's flexible way of describing features,
mappers are able to capture not only the name and address of a
community gardens, but also features like the hours that the garden is
open to the public, and even whether or not the garden offers
composting.

On November 22nd, OpenStreetMap NYC kicked off this collaboration
through a meetup where local community members came together to work
on mapping the gardens. Leading this meetup was Eric Brelsford, a NYC
Mapper and founder of 596 Acres, a non-profit
dedicated to land use and advocacy issues in New York City and Mara
Gittleman from the
NYC Community Garden Coalition, an activist
organization working to protect community gardens in the city.

This collaboration presents benefits to both GrowNYC and
OpenStreetMap. As Mara Gittleman explains, "Having an up-to-date map
can help gardeners, researchers, and allies make the case for
community gardens to funders and policy makers by showing their
proximity to things like schools, illustrate where they might make up
for lack of access to parks, quantify environmental benefits, etc."
Unlike proprietary maps like those from Google, the maps provided by
OpenStreetMap give direct access to the geographic data, allowing for
all the benefits to researchers and policymakers.

Using OpenStreetMap also presents benefits for to the community
gardens. Garden organizers and maintainers can now keep the
information about their gardens up to date on their own, without
needing an intermediary. And because OpenStreetMap is used by so many
websites, these community gardens will be getting exposure to millions
more people than they have before.

Because of its collaborative nature, its purposefully neutral stance
on data and its extensible data representation, it seems likely that
more community groups will use OpenStreetMap to shine a spotlight on
previously invisible features of our world.